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Page 1 of 1 pages for this article VIA EPIA EN15000 Review by Tuan Huynh
Published: 05/04/2006
VIA EPIA’s have always been a favorite among case modders and small form factor aficionados. Its small size, nearly silent operation, and integrated features made it perfect for small projects. The projects have varied from a liquor bottle PC to RC car PC’s. The small size opens up limitless possibilities for custom do-it-yourself case projects. While the size was perfectly fine, EPIA’s have been under powered and could use some extra oomph. It’s been a while since VIA initially announced their C7 processor but it’s now starting to show up in products. The new C7 processor promises low power consumption with more processing power over the existing C3 series of processors. After initially being shown at CES 2006, C7 powered products are beginning to show up in retail channels. The first C7 product we’ll be looking at is VIA’s new EPIA EN15000. With a new processor and chipset, does VIA’s new EPIA EN15000 have what it takes to serve multimedia or daily duties, or will it still be underpowered like previous EPIA’s. Keep reading to find out.
VIA’s EPIA EN15000 is pretty standard. It uses VIA’s new C7 processor clocked at 1.5 GHz, though a passively cooled 1.2 GHz model is also available. The new C7 is fabricated on IBM’s 90nm SOI technology and uses VIA’s new V4 bus clocked at 400 MHz. Though it has a fancy new name, VIA’s V4 bus is essentially the same as the bus used on P4 processors. Additionally the processor has your usual SSE2, SSE3 multimedia instructions, a full speed Floating Point Unit, NX bit support, and enhanced hardware encryption acceleration algorithms. With a new processor comes a new chipset as well. The EPIA EN15000 couples a new CN700 northbridge with a dated VT8237R southbridge. There are very little feature differences between the previous CN400 used on later C3 based EPIA’s and the new CN700. Aside for support for VIA’s V4 bus and DDR2 400/533 support, the CN700 shares the same UniChrome Pro AGP graphics core as the CN400. This is pretty disappointing as the UniChrome Pro graphics core could use a few upgrades in the multimedia department—mainly h.264 and WMV-HD hardware accelerated decoding. Integration of the VT8237R south bridge is disappointing as well, especially since VIA has a shiny new VT8251 that supports PCI Express, high definition audio, and SATAII. Instead VIA leaves us with the dated VT8237R which only supports PCI, AC’97 audio, and SATA 150. The rest of the specifications are nothing too special. Audio is provided by VIA’s VT1618 AC’97 audio codec, whether or not this is a good thing has yet to be determined as this is our first encounter with the codec. Gigabit is powered by VIA’s VT1622 PHY while expansion is limited to a single PCI slot—just like every other EPIA. next >
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